Inside out
Think tank: Social Market Foundation
Author(s): Jonathan Thomas
October 9, 2026
This report from UK think tank the Social Market Foundation examines how falling immigration numbers could lead to increasing tensions and divisons over UK immigration.
As net migration to the UK falls, the focus of immigration policy and immigration news flow is shifting away from numbers arriving, on to the inside perspective on immigration – the impact and status of recently arrived immigrants, and questions of internal immigration policy and control.
This is likely to exacerbate, rather than calm, public tensions and divisions over immigration, not least because the Labour government has encouraged public anger over the costs of this in order to seek credit for addressing the challenges.
The political shift to the inside perspective in the UK has been sudden and seismic, impacting many areas of immigration policy. On the political right, there has been an arms race of unprecedented policy commitments around removing rights, removing people, and the future of the UK’s relationship with the European Convention on Human Rights.
In the US, immigration attention has also recently dramatically shifted from the outside to the inside perspective, with divisive consequences for a deeply conflicted public. But key features of US history, economy and society arguably leave it, and its public opinion, better adapted and prepared than the UK for the stresses that can arise from key questions of internal immigration policy and control.
The US has for decades had to acknowledge, and grapple with, the challenges of border incursions, a large irregularly resident population, and the tensions and divisions that these create. The UK has not.
In the UK, fundamental aspects of the inside perspective on immigration remain largely unspoken, unseen and undiscussed. With the net migration number falling lower, the risk is that the political and public focus becomes directed to exactly these far more controversial aspects of internal immigration control, particularly as there are now ‘mainstream’ politicians incentivised and cavalier enough to turn the spotlight on them.
